Category: Art journal

Always great to be back at Lulu Art! I hope everyone has been able to find some arty time in the last month?

Today I wanted to showcase Kylie’s fabulous face stencils from Artistcellar. I chose the 3/4 face ‘JOY’ for this small art journal page. These face stencils make journaling faces so quick and easy… more time for journaling and less time for stessing about face math and getting my proportions correct. Kylie has done almost all the work for you… yay!

Back into my journal again… and you know I love to splash the paint around in there!
So… considering that I will be working closely with the “Art by Marlene” brand this year and Lulu Art stocks such a wide range of her lovely products, I thought I would grab one of her stencils, and a couple of Studio Light stamps in her range and see where we end up.

Hello there fabulous Lulu Art fans and happy 2019! Today I’m going to grab some beautiful paints, a stamp and stencil and of course my signature sparkles, and show you how to create this bright and bold art journal page! It’s pretty, filled with simple techniques and really packs a punch of colour!

Now as with most things it’s easier to show to the process for this page rather than tell you about it – so I’ve made a short video to walk you through it all step by step.

Add tiny bits of paint to the background using a paint scraper, I used Jane Davenport Acrylics and Dina Wakley’s Magenta and Turquoise.

Step 3

Use Magenta and Dark Blue Paint with a flat brush to create the flower bases. Add a second layer of Magenta to hide the background.

Step 4

Add a base layer of lime green to create the leaves and mix in a little of the blue paint to get a variety of green shades – it makes the leaves look more interesting. Then use blue paint and a wet brush to edge the floral pattern.

Step 5

Splatter Distress Ink with water then blot with paper towel and begin to add the details. Begin by adding extra detail to the flowers, using a flat brush add pink to one side of brush and white to the other side and paint the petals. Then make that page shimmer by using the Starry Colors set from Gansai Tambi – add Starry GOLD and magenta and silver Metallic Mermaid Markers! Just watch the page begin to shimmer! Flick the background with Starry Gold and also add this to the flowers.

Step 6

Cover the smile sticker with white paint, then add the sticker to the page and add more white paint (so it really pops) then cover with Nuvo Glitter Drops and add a few white Higgins Drawing Ink paint drips to break up the background.

Step 7

Also, embellish flower with Nuvo Glitter Drops.

Step 8

Add doodling and outlines to the flowers and leaves with Paint Markers.

And the Make you SMILE style page is finished! I hope it makes YOU smile 🙂

It has been hectic in our household this last few weeks with the wrap up of the school year. My girls finish school tomorrow though! (Cheering… can’t wait for the holidays!!).

So I grabbed a few moments to unwind this weekend and put together this page with a few supplies I picked up at Lulu Art.

I never really know where I am heading when I start out on an art journey. I just begin with a bundle of goodies and one of the many Dylusions journals. I try to slap some paint down pretty quickly so I don’t get any chances to overthink what I am doing. I choose whichever colour speaks to me on the day. The Dina Wakley ~ Fuschia has been calling my name a lot lately!

With this page, I rough stencilled over with lime green using the ‘Blooming Garden’ stencil by TCW. I can see that this will be one of my favourites for a while… all those pretty flowers just make a lovely background. I next painted with my sponge through the stencil to highlight each of the stencils features.

Washi was next… anyone else is addicted to washi? I have so many of these little rolls of goodness and take any opportunity to get them out. This pink dot on green roll is from the #4 Dina Wakley washi set and it didn’t disappoint!(The #3 set is equally as great… #justsayin !!)

set #3

set #4

So once I could see two big round flowers, the page took on a life of its own… you can check out the finished page and the process video below.

Like this:

Well hello Lulu Art fans, today I’m going to play with something new, Dina Wakley Pouring Medium – it’s fun and a little scary and my friend Kylie who owns Lulu Art, thinks I’m about to make a huge mess, she might just be right (though I hope not)!

Pouring Medium is an acrylic medium that you mix with Dina Wakley acrylic paint (or any acrylic paint really). This mixture becomes a pourable, fluid paint that you play with to create interesting effects. To help you create cells in your pours, we also created Cell Creator. Just a few drops in your pour mixtures creates serious MAGIC!

So how do you use Pouring Medium and Cell Creator?

Start by adding a little Dina Wakley paint into a small mixing bowl or cup – use a different bowl for each color. I think perhaps limit the colors to 5-7 different colors to begin – just so you don’t make a really big mess!

Add the Dina Wakley Pouring medium to each cup, a good ratio to use is 1 part paint to 4 parts pouring medium

Stir gently with a spoon or paddle pop stick

Add 1 drop of the Cell creator to some of the paint mixes for larger cells, or add more for smaller cells, you can try adding more to one color of paint and see what happens

Tip each paint mixture over your surface – one after another
OR for a DIRTY POUR tip all of the paint into one bowl or cup and quickly upend this over your surface

Tilt the surface or encourage the paint to move across the surface using a brush or paddle pop stick to create interesting patterns and effects

Once happy with your design leave it to dry. Drying time depends on your climate, more humidity means a longer drying time – give it at least 24 hours.

For my mixed media journal cover, I also created a little combination of Lindy’s Magicals mixed with water and Pouring medium and added this to the mix (next time I would NOT add any water to this as it made it too runny) and I also added some glitter – again I wouldn’t add this to a colored pour as it got lost – looked way better sprinkled over the top.

To finish off the journal cover I’ve added stamped images and then embellished with paint pens and stenciled images and a few paint drips – keeping it simple!

I’ve created a video so you can watch my little experiment and see how I finished off my journal cover just in case you might like to try something similar.

Tips

The pouring medium dries to a satin finish, though depending on the acrylic paint you’ve used it can turn out quite matt.